I’m not a huge fan of converged infrastructure solutions but a lot of companies love the simplicity and the initial agility of such implementations, that has led to the relative success of solutions like VCE vBlock and FlexPod.
The hyper-converged systems aim to provide the same advantages, like guaranteed performance and hardware compatibility, a single point of contact for the support, etc, but in a smaller piece of hardware and with an higher level of automation.
Today at VMworld 2014 VMware announced EVO:RAIL a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCIA) that allows VMware’s OEM partners (initially Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Inspur, NetOne and SuperMicro) to enter in the same market of vendors like Nutanix and SimpliVity.
EVO:RAIL is built on top of vSphere, vCenter Server and Virtual SAN combining compute, network and storage resources into a single unit of deployment.
You can learn more about EVO:RAIL visting www.vmware.com/products/evorail and with this 4 videos:
- EVO:RAIL: Full End-to-End Experience
- EVO:RAIL: Configuration Experience
- EVO:RAIL: Management Experience
- EVO:RAIL: Adding a New Appliance Experience
VMware also announced EVO:RACK Technology Preview, also a hyper-converged solution but intended for medium-to-large enterprises and able to scale to tens of racks.
EVO:RACK leverages the full line-up of VMware’s solutions for Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) including vCloud Suite and NSX.